Flashback: Joe Biden Said He's On Board with China's One Child Policy Not Too Long Ago
Former Vice President Joe Biden has now officially joined the ranks of Democrats running for president, which means there’s no better time to yet again re-examine why he’d be a terrible choice for the office.
We don’t even need to focus on what he’s done, although we certainly could. We can just look at what he’s said.
It’s not just that Biden is prone to gaffes such as, “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”
It’s not just that he’s said things that ended presidential campaigns, like the time his 1988 bid for the White House was stalled when he failed to properly attribute part of a speech he gave to British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. Sure, it may be plagiarism, but it was also 30 years in the past.
Here’s something a little more recent: a speech from 2011 in which he told an audience in China that he “fully” understood Beijing’s profoundly immoral one-child policy.
The then-vice president said in a visit to Sichuan University that he understood the country’s massive penalties on families who had more than one baby — a practice which a State Department official once described as “tantamount to coercion that leads to abortion,” according to Fox News.
To be fair, he was answering a question about U.S. debt owned by China, a debt which he partially attributed to entitlement programs. This was due in part, he said, to an aging baby boomer generation that had led to a glut of people taking out of the system while there were proportionally fewer people paying into it. China, he said, had similar issues due to the one-child policy.
“As I was talking with some of your leaders, you share a similar concern,” Biden said. “You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.”
Biden noted how this was “not sustainable” because you had a situation where “one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people.”
“So hopefully we can act in a way on a problem that’s much less severe than yours, and maybe we can learn together from how we can do that,” he said.
While China’s lack of younger workers paying into safety-net programs is indeed an issue, I think maybe we ought not have American leaders who are “not second-guessing” the one-child policy except as it relates to fiscal matters when China’s own statistics show more than 330 million abortions and 196 million sterilizations carried out in the country since 1971.
Sex-selective abortions also led to a country with 30 million more men than women. (The policy officially began being enforced in 1979 and was eliminated at the end of 2015.)
At the time, Biden quelled the minor uproar his comments created by saying that he wasn’t interested in starting a “polemic debate.” Biden’s spokeswoman, Kendra Barkoff, also asserted that both he and the administration were opposed to the one-child policy.
“The Obama Administration strongly opposes all aspects of China’s coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization,” she told The Daily Caller. “The Vice President believes such practices are repugnant. …
“He also pointed out, in China, that the policy is, as a practical matter, unsustainable. He was arguing against the One Child Policy to a Chinese audience.”
Biden was opposed to the policy during his time in Congress, which isn’t particularly surprising considering even the bluest of states and/or districts don’t send people to Washington when they’re crowing about the benefits of forced sterilization and coerced abortions in the world’s most populous despotism. I harbor no doubt he was opposed to the one-child policy.
That’s not the problem. The problem was he failed to verbalize that opposition when in China.
“(A)rguing against the One Child Policy to a Chinese audience” doesn’t include being obeisant to the point where you say you’re “not second-guessing” a policy your spokeswoman would later say you find “repugnant.” Showing one’s opposition to the policy wouldn’t even require a “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” moment.
In fact, opposition didn’t even need to be shown. All Biden had to do was take his mental editor’s pen and scratch out that part where he said “I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing” the policy. That he didn’t was the most telling gaffe of all.
He’s perfectly willing to talk about roughing up the president because Trump says stuff that makes him angry. Standing before an audience in America’s most menacing frenemy, he was just as willing to hedge his words when talking about what was arguably the Chinese government’s most odious policy.
Profiles in courage, this is not.
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